power/knowledge/internet

In the interim since I’ve posted, I’ve met and surpassed the 21 Challenge fundraising goal, got the school library staffed for next year, organized two really awesome programs (youth-elder exchange, academic skills workshops), sorted through a MASSIVE book donation from Yellowknife (23 boxes worth!) and made some huge orders from educational publishers. So June is going to be a month of slowing down, no more staying late late late at work, and weekends are now strictly for myself. Except now I’m blogging about work. Ha. The funny thing is, I’ve spent all this time in the library but looking back, I’ve hardly done any traditional library work. It’s been mainly presentations, proposal writing, PR, lobbying, and managing a gazillion little tasks. Would have died without my links and notes on pbwiki.

I’ve also been doing all kinds of awesome non-information studies related things and to be honest, a lot of the issues I used to think about down south aren’t relevant here, so my mind really has not been analyzing and crunching through topics related to this blog. It’s difficult to keep up with the technology and news here where no one has a clue what web 2.0 is, identity management is still about word of mouth reputation, and everyone turns to the radio or gossip vine first for news. It’s been a gradual, protracted unplugging from the net and a culling of what information I want to keep intaking and what qualifies as a time suck to permanently cut out. After 5 months of detox, I’m ready to return to my old cyborg state.

The campaign has been coming along with some fits and starts. It seems that the branding really hasn’t taken hold here, and remarkably, news of the campaign seems spread much faster through certain channels in Yellowknife! One really needs to be literal here. Hardly anyone in town refers to the 21 Challenge, it is always referred to directly, as the library project. The 21 tags are seen as “cute” and have momentarily raise people’s curiousity, but haven’t had the impact I’d hoped for.

Another difficulty is that my experience is based in methods of communication/promotion that are bound to the internet and most older people here do not read blogs and are not on any social network. While I’ve spoken on the CBC a few times now, had articles featured in local and territorial wide newspapers, submitted blurbs to local newsletters etc, the bulk of information remains online which is not the best way to reach the community. It seems to me that ties forged through face to face contact, community projects and individuals, are really what works, slow as these methods are.

On another note, I’ve learned something really important from the challenges of working on this project. Down south, it seems to me that it is common place to complain about the minutae of one’s work on a frequent and regular basis when things are difficult. I’ve come to realize that at least for myself, this manner of complaining is a sign of luxury; if I have the time and energy to bitch, then the problems I face in my work really aren’t worth bitching about.

No one local complains about the cold here because it is truly so harsh, that if everyone voiced their discomfort, nothing would ever get done. Even the “expats” learn quickly to brush off the extremity of the weather. It’s pretty much the same way about working to change negative trends here. Up north, the frustrations and obstacles can be so extreme or insurmountable at times, it would be foolish to begin adopting a negative attitude. I find myself now thinking “it is what it is” instead of a complaint. Instead of laying blame on other people or groups, which I find comprises a great deal of work related complaining, I remind myself to suck it up, look for solutions, and keep trying to hit my marks. And I don’t even think about the real possibility of total failure; don’t have the energy for it to spare. Sometimes I find myself sliding back into old habits, but I’ve found the need for efficiency eventually demands a halt to the slippage.

Since fundraising has not been going well, I decided to take a completely different approach than what I had been doing before. There are a lot of programs here that require funding so my challenge has been how to put this issue on the map. I’ve racked my brain and have turned to the southern way to get people to become invested and pay attention: branding and aggressive urban marketing techniques. This means taking the logic of consumer culture (which I actually loathe; one of the reasons I enjoy being in the north is relief from advertising) and applying it to a fundraising campaign. No wait, our exciting guerrilla fundraising campaign! Complete with easy to remember name, objectives, and catchy tagline: campaign site (And please don’t laugh at the logo. I did it in such a hurry!)

It’s just so southern. People do not really do branding here. There are no ads save those on television (radio is CBC and locally broadcast), and that is pretty much the extent of exposure to branding. It’s like postmodernism has completely ignored this town and it’s all WYSIWYG. Which means that instead of having a population that is well trained in ignoring extraneous information, where every product, cause or statement needs to outwit and outdo a thousand others, I am looking at a situation where there is zero competition for attention and very little feel for connecting a product or service with an abstracted narrative or image. I feel a little guilty framing this cause in such blatantly commercialized “language” but at the same time, I think I’ll probably be the only person who sees it this way because the values of consumer culture are more or less absent here. Does this make my job easy or will the branding be too “southern” to connect with locals? Certainly, I’m finding that showing up in person to discuss proposals, and getting people to trust you to speak at meetings and such is primary. We’ll have to see.

Next week, when the students return to school, I am hoping to implement a marketing strategy quite common in the city, the likes of which this town has never seen. I want everyone to be talking about it! Will update you all on how it works or doesn’t work.

That’s been one of my mottos these past few weeks. I’ve been busy trying to speak with organizations in town about the school library and I’m hoping that my efforts here will help convince the powers that be that the school needs a librarian. I’m finding one of the best ways to do this is to whip out the academic research that links the quality of school libraries to student achievement, and to do whatever you can do to dispell the myth that librarians are these fussy old shushing women sorting dusty books. You need to inject different terms into the mix like “media/information specialist” or “critical/central information resource” or “information literacy”. It’s remarkably easy to advocate for school libraries. We live in an information age and students need to learn how to utilize the internet beyond social networking. Plus, we are talking about youth. And don’t these organizations want to help the children?

I’ve also found that because the community here is small, it’s very easy to be able to reach the higher tiers of power that are usually inaccessible in the south. I run into CEOs and CFOs in the grocery stores, my roommate is the comptroller for the educational council, I take language lessons with the VP of the Gwich’in Tribal Council, and so on. Just last week, I have tried to convince the educational council board members, the NWT premier, and the board members of the GTC to support our school library. It’s wild. I had assumed I would be a librarian assistant so I only brought one formal business outfit up with me and I need to ask people to send me clothes because there’s nowhere in town to buy them. Did I also mention that meetings with these aboriginal organizations are kind of awesome? Only here will you sit in a totally modern board room discussing policy and budgeting resources with elders and be treated to a mini-feast of caribou soup, bannock, cranberry muffins etc. afterwards.

Anyways, I’m going to be compiling a resource for people in similar situations with links to studies and articles to aid librarians in their advocacy efforts, funding programs, tips for fundraising in the north etc. although this probably won’t get done until late April after I’ve run my mega mega fundraising campaign (marketing/fundraising in the north post to follow).

This past week, I have been trying to raise the profile of our library project via the Amazon wishlist and things have picked up momentum a lot faster than I anticipated. CBC North was interested in the story, so you might hear me speaking about the project on The Trailbreaker news and an interview with the principal and myself will be aired on the Northwind program tomorrow @ noon. I haven’t even finished editing the project’s press release yet!

Funding itself is diffcult, and I spend a fair amount of time running down a lot of dead ends, exhausting avenues. However, on the donations front, things have been wonderful. The ICRC and GTC donated a great deal of cultural materials and have been a great aid in helping me develop a special aboriginal collection for our students. A few weeks ago, we also received a large shipment of Japanese cultural materials from the JFT, and occasional meetings with the librarians in the Inuvik Centennial Public Library have yielded a fair crop of YA fiction and general interest items. Other organizations like the NWT Literacy Council and the Aboriginal Healing Foundation have offered donations of materials.

It was however, Daron @ Squatterz Books & Curiousities in Yellowknife that really got the ball rolling there. In addition to spreading our cause online and helping connect me with other leads, Daron has organized a book drive in the area as well as a little benefit concert for us on the weekend!

Quyanainni and Mahsi’ choo <3

Samuel Hearne Secondary School needs new books! For those of you who are new to this blog, I have been volunteering for a high school up north in Canada in a small aboriginal community (Inuvialuit/Gwich’in) and have been managing a project to revive its library which is in need of new resources.

We are currently trying to rebuild our collection and are now seeking book donations through Amazon.ca. It’s easy to help us out! Just purchase a book through our Amazon.ca wishlist and they will ship it up to us. If the link doesn’t work, you can try the wishlist widget which you can access it through this link: http://esum.tigblog.org/post/342009. If all else fails, you can just search “shss” or “samuel hearne” on Amazon.ca and the list should show up.

To tell you a little more about this project, there is currently no librarian! I’ve had to weed a fair amount of outdated and damaged materials from our collection and am trying to raise circulation. In rebuilding our new collection, we are trying to accomplish a number of goals including:

- preserving local aboriginal languages (Inuvialuktun and Gwich’in) and promoting awareness and understanding of aborginal cultures and peoples amongst our students - not only Northern Canadian, but indigenous people from around the world
- increasing literacy levels, a major challenge for our school
- help students gain important research and academic skills

If you have any questions, comments etc. please email me at shssinuvik AT gmail DOT com or TIG message me!

I’ve finally wrapped up a 2 week run of “student interest sessions” up north to gather a snapshot of the media usage of students in the school and to get some student feedback on what types of materials they would like to have in the library, possible changes to the decor etc. I interviewed 5 classes from grades 7-12. Although this was by no means scientific, the sessions helped me to gauge the state of media usage in this town’s youth. Some interesting observations:

• no one knew basic web 2.0 terms like rss or tagging
• the younger students didn’t even know the term “blog” despite the fact that they are all on bebo (Blog Early, Blog Often)
• almost all students had a television in their bedrooms; more students had bedroom TVs than students who had internet connections in their homes
• while the grade 11s and 12s students used the internet for a variety of purposes (social networking, research for school or general reference, news, webcomics, gaming etc.), the younger students used the internet almost exclusively as a social networking tool

It’s this last point that really struck me, almost disturbs me. I suppose it’s because the internet for my generation was about a certain kind of information, more reference based. Except for chat, modes of communication like discussion boards and newsgroups were primarily about sharing a more subject oriented, literate type of information (as opposed more speaker oriented, oral information. See earlier post). Even email (at least, when I first started using it), was a more literate form of communicating. It still is, when you compare it to IM, SNS “walls”, twitter posts etc.

It’s as if nothing exists outside bebo or youtube for the younger students. While I have seen students this age at the local youth center use different sites, I have never seen them use the internet for reference or more literate forms of information. In a town where resources for youth are more limited than those living in urban areas, the internet becomes that much more important as a way for youth to do research and to learn about the outside world. With the North becoming a new site of social, political and economic interest (opening trade routes, mining, climate change etc.) it seems to me that youth would really benefit from increasing information literacy skills if they are going to be able to protect their land and help direct its development. Yet, the internet seems to be becoming less and less of a resource when it should be being utilized more and more…

Information literacy is something I take great interest in and it wasn’t until I came up north that I began to think of this type of literacy as having many tiers. For one thing, it never even occured to me that before one can become “information literate” one must be literate to begin with. Up north, poor reading comprehension is a major challenge for schools. This is due to a number of factors, of which common northern social problems and a high incidence of FAS/FAE play no small part. I came here imagining that I would be teaching students “the basics”: skills like evaluating information from websites and researching beyond Google’s first page. Now that I’m here, I find need to take a completely different approach: build basic reading skills with hi/lo materials, designing the library with new audio-visual stations, working with the students’ innate interest in the north and trying to foster greater engagement with their own cultural heritages and languages.

I never really considered how important things like culture, values etc. are to the digital divide. Some factors that are essential in examining the digital divide that I never considered before:

• cultural values supporting education and use of technology
• cultural values supporting civic engagement etc.
• basic literacy
• no-low censorship, laws protecting freedom of information
• laws and policies protecting user privacy
• well maintained public library infrastructure
• specialized hardware (e.g. aboriginal keyboards, aids for users with perceptual disabilities)
• access to conferences, barcamps, media based communities, etc.

I’m writing from Fort McPherson, a small town (roughly 400 people) populated mostly by Gwich’in people. I’m making a very long day trip (7:00 am - 2:00 am) to obtain Gwich’in language materials for the school library. I’ve learned that the best way to get things done here is to do as much legwork yourself as possible, and to meet with people face to face. I spend a lot of time trying to hunt people down and showing up in random organizations since most people don’t seem to care about keeping appointments on time and don’t mind dropping everything to talk to you if you just pop up out of nowhere.

I just had a very long chat with a local Gwich’in community member and learned that the Gwich’in word for internet translates to machine that knows everything. Which is kind of awesome. (I should learn the Inuvialuktun word for internet too as they just got their vocab updated.)

In other news, the school library has been cleared out, and I am now in the process of building a mega acquisitions list, scoping out library software and barcoding systems, looking for audiovisual materials for special needs students, researching aboriginal keyboards, planning out which budgets can be used for which materials, conducting interest groups with the students etc. etc. The list goes on and on (and on) and I am basically trying to be in a thousand places at the same time. But right now, I’m just taking a break in Fort McPherson’s school, my clothing still smelling like the smoky cabin where I had bannock and tea with a couple Gwich’in residents.

For people who love books, weeding is a difficult task to do, but an essential one for an attractive and useful collection. Despite that, for most people, saving books is heavily associated with preserving knowledge and you don’t want to throw knowledge away. But knowledge and information are different things. Most books at the primary and secondary school level only contain information, facts. Such things become proven inaccurate. Or they are no longer relevant ideologically (e.g. an overtly sexist text from the 50s) or in terms of topic (e.g. espionage books aren’t all the rage now that the Cold War is over). Or maybe the content is still useful, but its form is curled up from water damage, covered in graffiti and there’s a dried up piece of gum stuck to it. Yes, I came across more of those than I care to say.

Luckily, at the library I’m working at, I don’t have to justify my aggressive weeding. In fact, everyone’s pleased to see that I haven’t dawdled around with this project, and some students have become involved by helping me sort the discarded materials into decade piles (so we know exactly how old everything is). That made my weeding job much easier plus it was entertaining to see trends in typography, graphic design, illustration and topics over the years.

Some sections were a snap to clear because I discarded almost everything: Harlequin romances, encyclopedia sets, general reference books, anything related to computers etc. Other sections had me practically paralyzed: biography, history, literature, YA fiction. I’m holding a biography of Louis Riel and debating furiously for 7 seconds. Pros: accurate information, Canadian topic, concerns Native Americans, key historical figure, good condition, relevant to student curriculum. Cons: bland cover, no pictures inside, small print, difficult/boring language, doubtful students will read, replaceable with an awesome graphic novel. For the past 2 weeks, my entire day has been filled with these mini-debates. I have gone through countless sandwich baggies to protect my hands from the dust. Last night, I dreamt I was opening books to find their publication dates. It’s hard work but it’s also a lot of fun to be able to do collection management (link is a great librarian resource btw) at such an intensive level. I have never known any library as thoroughly and completely as this one.